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Suggestion for "Real World" CPU performance test

    Hello, I'm a grad student in the US and I just saw the clock speed video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QOoQWvrQ-Y&ab_channel=LinusTechTips) and I remember a video in the past using SolidWorks. There is the free to use hydrodynamic solver called HEC-RAS (Hydrologic Engineering Center - River Analysis System) (https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/) that I use as a base for my research and the US Army Corps of Engineers who developed it put out this pdf on how to speed up run times (small models are 10-30min and large ones can take tens of hours) (https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/documentation/HEC-RAS_Computer_Performance.pdf) with "Processor speed is paramount." in bold and underlined. It goes on to explain that core count does not really affect the run times, and that RAM write speeds are also extremely important. 

    My lab group purchased a computer with this information in mind a couple years ago and had great results, but after seeing the video I realized that this CPU only PDE solver would be a great gauge of the total performance on CPU intensive tasks that can come up in real workplace applications (including non-GPU computing coding executions). It is small and free to download (<400Mb) and currently has support for Windows and Linux* (*one update behind for Linux support) and it can run multiple instances at once to hammer any number of cores to full load (gets to ~60% use with one instance on 16 cores). If there is interest, I can easily make a zip of a project with all open-source data that will take 30-50 min to run so it can just be opened with the program and ran as is. Not sure if there is much desire for this kind of testing outside of STEM fields, but I would have loved a comparison when we were getting a local solver machine for the lab group. 

HEC-RAS Running.png

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